The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson

Caroline Lash, a native Manhattanite who works in publishing, is burnt out at 28 and eager to get away from the shadow of her prima donna mother, a bestselling author. On the strength of having published one story in the New Yorker, she secures a writing fellowship and heads to Boston’s North Shore for a year. On the way to fictional Greenhead, she meets Van Whittaker, who works at the Hammond Castle Museum, and soon they are a couple, and she is included if not welcomed by his high school friend group: